Lansing Pinball League

Tyler with his Smackdown Undercard winner medal.

September 25 was the sixth meeting of Season 11 (out of eight) so we are starting to head into the endgame.  Unsurprisingly, this has some members starting to pay close attention to the current standings.  The day of league, I found a message on Facebook from Chris, who (understandably) misunderstood what was actually a spreadsheet error to mean that we had changed the policy for missed meetings from “get last place on all games” to “get 0 points on all games” which makes a huge difference.  Chris missed two meetings this season, which would leave him way out of A division if he received a 0 for his missed night.  Fortunately, this was actually just a mistake, which Joseph quickly fixed when alerted to it.  Sorry, Chris, you don’t have your excuse to quit coming… yet!

We had two new league members join this time, married couple Tim and Sarah.  I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Tim, but I did chat a bit with Sarah and learned that she used to live in the Seattle area, where there is a thriving pinball scene.  Although she has a longstanding interest in pinball, this is the first time she and Tim have played in an actual league.  I hope the long night we had (somehow logjams kept happening) doesn’t deter Tim and Sarah from coming back!

This was our first night playing Road Show, which moved to the Avenue recently.  Danny and I were in the same group and we had a ridiculously close pair of scores, with mine beating his by about 300K out of 355 million.  Joseph points out that there were a high number of these kinds of close calls – check out the standings document and see for yourself!

Finalists Mike and Derik demonstrate the best way to hang around Smackdown winner Danny. Not pictured: the other A finalist, Chad.

By a vote of the league (on Facebook), we made Iron Maiden the Smackdown game again so that people could have another opportunity to qualify for Stern’s “Up the Irons” contest.  Only games played during an IFPA-endorsed tournament or league are permitted to count for the contest.  No one set a new high score, though I heard Danny had one over 1 billion before Joseph arrived to start taking scores, unfortunately.  Danny won the Smackdown (shocker!).  The Undercard was fought out on AC/DC again.  This time it turned into a family feud as Chad played in the Smackdown and Tyler played on the Undercard.  Tyler showed his dad how it’s done, taking the Undercard medal home.

Since I’m posting this you all know that means it’s time for another league meeting.  I’ll see you tomorrow at the Avenue at 7:30.

Our fifth meeting of Season 11 was supposed to be the one that would bring us up to date on all the games we had not yet played so far this season.  Instead, by the time it rolled around, we had received a new game at The Avenue: Road Show, or as I call it, “twice the heads, half the fun.”  But hey, half the fun of FunHouse is still pretty darned fun.  It was too late to make it part of league night #5, so it will be on the list for our next meeting.

The big excitement of the night is that our T-shirts, courtesy of Pinball Pete’s, were delivered!  Everyone should thank Derik for co-ordinating the T-shirt design and printing.  If you missed picking up your shirt, I will have them at league tomorrow.

The other big excitement of the night was that we were finally playing Iron Maiden during league.  Stern is currently running a high score tournament called Up the Irons.  In order to qualify for it, a player must set a high score on Iron Maiden at a Stern Army location while playing a game for an IFPA tournament or league.  Only games played for the event can be submitted.  That means that this was the first chance for LPL players to take a whack at it.  I posted the current-as-far-as-I-knew cutoff score for 10th place (the bottom of the leader board) and three players all exceeded it during the course of the night.  Unfortunately, Joseph’s and Derik’s scores turned out to fall short of 10th place by the time I submitted them to the IFPA the next day (Joseph’s by a mere 2 million).  Danny’s 779 million score, however, put him in third place and put LPL on the map.  As of this writing he is still in third, with the title “Cyborg Eddie.”

Sure, Iron Maiden is great and all, but it’s no “Dr. Dude.”

Our Smackdown game was Getaway. Thanks to the very long night of people having epic games of Iron Maiden, the Smackdown finals were quite late.  My group finished but another was still playing, so I went upstairs to drop a single score on it like I usually try to do for completeness’ sake.  I had a pretty lousy game of 20 million or so, noted it, and started to wander off, when Jason walked up,  handed me an extra dollar for his entry fee, and started a game.  He said, “Want to play two players?”  I’m not sure quite why, but despite not planning to play again, on an impulse I said “Well… sure.”  The next time I did something like 130 million, not exactly a normal result for me on Getaway, so I ended up in the finals.  I think I bumped out Mike S. last minute with that.  Sorry, Mike.  In the finals, Tim ran away with it (appropriate, right?) by, among other things, having a multiball with a big old super jackpot.  I ended up trying my darnedest on Ball 3 to come from behind and while I did a lot of work and got to a pretty decent score, I kept missing the multiball start shot that would have been my only hope.

We hadn’t done “beat-em-up” pictures for the Smackdown finals in a while and someone (I forget who) really wanted to, so here you go!  So many people had left that the two finals divisions consisted of everyone still present, leaving the Undercard with only three players.  I wonder if some people don’t realize we have a second division.

Derik, Danny, and I beat up the Smackdown champ, Tim. (That’s me about to hit him with a chair.)

Mike and Bryan beat up the Undercard winner, Joseph.

Our next league night is tomorrow. It will be the sixth of the season, meaning we are getting close to the final stretch. Don’t forget that players have to be present for at least four league nights to qualify to play in the season finals. New players can still join, but they won’t be able to play in the main tournament on finals night (though they will be able to play in the side tournament). See you all tomorrow at 7:30 at The Avenue!

Season 11, league night 1 of 8

Games played: AC/DC, Game of Thrones, Iron Man, Metallica, South Park

Results for the night and the season so far

Mike sent me a message saying “Give Uncle Gary a hug for me and tell him I don’t like Game of Thrones.” So here I am giving him a hug…

…and here I am telling him that Mike doesn’t like Game of Thrones.

June 12 was our first league night of Season 11, and it brought with it an exciting development.  The Avenue is now Stern Army location #104!  Derik and Pinball Pete’s helped me get us enrolled, so now our league and tournaments are eligible for prizes (e.g. translites) from Stern and we can host official launch parties for new games.  Members of the league will also receive Stern Army Recruit dogtags.  Those who attended our season opener already have theirs, and I will be passing out more at our league night tonight.  We also got the Stern Army banner featuring “Uncle Gary” (as I call him… but not to his face so far).  Even though we are past the official window for Iron Maiden launch parties, Zach Sharpe of Stern graciously sent me an extra trophy plaque he had on hand so that we can have our first Stern Army launch party.  That will be coming up on July 12; more on that later.

There was another unexpected development at The Avenue: Fish Tales and Jack-Bot were out (boo!  I loved gambling with my points!) and Elvis and World Cup Soccer were in.  Elvis is totally new to The Avenue, but World Cup Soccer had a previous term of residence before being removed for quite a while.  Meanwhile, Joseph had chosen the league games for the night based on a new rotation scheme of skipping five between each entry in alphabetical order.  A similar idea was suggested by former league member Todd as a way of ensuring we didn’t end up with games being played in the same blocks this season.  When we arrived and found the alphabetical order now disrupted, we had to stick with the already announced games, but it set our new plan already in partial disarray.  As someone or other said, “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ league runners gang aft a-gley.”  I think it was Gary Stern.

Chris playing Star Trek in the Smackdown.

We had 12 in attendance at our first night, not too bad of a turnout but a little low due to the conspicuous absence of several regulars including Lupe, Caleb, and Mike S.  (Yes, Mike S.  I can’t remember the last time he missed Lansing league.)  We did have a brand new member, Bryce.  Last season Joseph had attempted to work out a scheme for allocating groups that would avoid putting any of the top players together while also balancing the group in other ways, but in the end it did not appear to speed up league play in the way it was intended to, and it also meant people missed out on the fun of meeting new people in random groups.  So I brought back the original group sorting method, famously employed by Matt in the early seasons of the league: I brought back “the hat.”  Well, not literally the same hat as I assume Matt took that one with him to Kalamazoo.  I actually used my hat with deer ears and antlers that I usually wear to the Silver Balls tournament.  It’s a very “me” version of a venerable league tradition and drawing our groups from a hat seemed to be a quicker and more flexible way of allocating groups last time so I think we will be sticking with it for now.

Tim playing Demolition Man in the Undercard match.

The Tuesday Night Smackdown side tournament has also returned for Season 11, with a couple of changes.  Since we probably won’t have as many people eligible to play as rookies this season, we are now just going to have an A and B division for qualifiers 1-4 and 5-8, called the “Smackdown Championship” and the “Undercard” respectively.  The other change is that to help cover a possible shortfall from dues in funding the league’s expenses,  we are now allowing everyone one free entry in the Smackdown tournament, with additional entries being $1 each.

Our next meeting is in just a few hours (yes, even in the summer I’m late with the recaps), and it’s still a great time to join since your lowest night of the season is dropped, so missing the first night won’t hurt you.  We are going to be taking July off of league due to the league runners needing to get ready for Pinburgh, but we will be filling in the gap by having two July tournaments: Rocket Robin, the annual round robin charity tournament for the Capital Area Humane Society, on July 10; and the Iron Maiden launch party on July 17.  The latter is also a celebration of our induction into the Stern Army, so it is going to have a Stern “Battle of the Bands” format.  Competitors will qualify on AC/DC, Elvis, Iron Maiden, and Metallica, with the top 8 going to playoffs.

Smackdown finalists Derik, Chris (the Champion), Danny, and Terry, with our new Stern Army banner.

The Undercard finalists, Tim, Kristen (the winner), Joseph, and Tim.

See you all very soon!